A month after the damning McKinsey report was made public, Lebanese designers are keen to increase their role in the burgeoning knowledge economy, one of the five sectors the report hopes can save Lebanon’s economy. But they are saddled with labor laws that disadvantage a market saturated with freelancers, and a dearth of jobs opportunities and investors.
Fantasmeem, a yearlong program recently initiated by the Goethe Institut, seeks to address these issues by supporting Lebanon’s design industry and equipping designers with entrepreneurial skills.
“Design is the meeting point between creativity and technology. Who better to transform crises than designers?” activist and consultant Gilbert Doumit said at Fantasmeem’s launch on Feb. 5.
“Although the McKinsey report mentions the creative sector within the knowledge economy - it does not specifically refer to the design industry,” Doumit said during a panel discussion titled “Design in Times of Crisis” at the launch.
The 1,200 page report recommended that within the knowledge economy, the Culture Ministry should “take a bet on specific cultural and creative industries,” citing the U.K. as a country that successfully encouraged specific creative niches like TV production, video games, arts and music.
But under its recommendations for the knowledge economy, the McKinsey report doesn’t single out design as a locus of this movement - even though the design industry is booming in Lebanon.
In the annual World Design Rankings, Lebanon consistently ranks within the top third of countries worldwide, last year placing 24th out of the 99 countries included.
Countries are ranked based on the number of designers that have been granted the A’ Design Award, an accolade considered by many to be the industry’s most prestigious.
Last year, Lebanon garnered 33 of these awards.
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A show of hands at Fantasmeem’s launch indicated that the vast majority of the attending designers were freelancers. Doumit said he believes the current labor law needs reform to extend social security to this group of workers.
“If you are an entrepreneur and create a startup you lose your social security. People are not conscious that [social security] is their right. But the sense of insecurity is there.”
He told The Daily Star that for young voters in the 2018 parliamentary elections, reforming the labor law for freelancers was a “core issue.” Doumit unsuccessfully ran for a Beirut I seat as part of the political group LiBaladi, against incumbent Nadim Gemayel.
Myriam Saad, a freelance graphic designer, said she agrees a social security plan would help incentivize the design industry in Lebanon.
“Even if we paid $5 in tax, I don’t know where it goes because the government provides nothing,” she said.
Lebanon’s new Labor Minister Camille Abousleiman told The Daily Star that his ministry will prioritize modernizing the labor law, including expanding social security, but did not single out freelancers as a group in need of this support.
But for Saad, a bigger problem is finding job opportunities in Lebanon. “I would consider relocating for the sake of kick-starting a more promising career as a freelancer,” she told The Daily Star.
Fantasmeem hopes to give designers business skills to help them find their markets. The program offers a variety of opportunities for designers from the MENA region living in Lebanon, including a design residency program, professional mentoring and guidance for startup ideas, startup grants and job shadowing opportunities.
“The design business is like any business in which the outcome is either a design product or a design service,” said Ghassan Salameh, Director of Beirut Design Week 2018 and consultant for the Goethe Institut. “The idea behind Fantasmeem on the larger scale is to create jobs and support the local economy.”
“When I started my design studio in 2013, I struggled to find anyone to mentor me. All funds were going into the tech industry. But participants in Fantasmeem will exit the program with an action plan. They must be initiators,” Salameh said.
He added that he had to look for inventive ways of convincing sponsors to invest in Beirut Design Week: “We had to show [sponsors] how design can change a city. In order to convince the municipality of Beirut to be a partner, we didn’t involve them in the planning stage, but approached them only when we could prove we were relevant.”
Roula Haidar, general manager of L’Artisan du Liban, which supports local craftsmanship, agreed that for the design industry to flourish here, designers must emphasize function.
“Design must have a purpose. It should bring solutions to people.
“How dare we limit design to the traditional definition of handicraft?” she said during the discussion.
The panel was under no illusion that design could solve all of Lebanon’s problems. The event’s moderator Lilian Abou Zeki began discussions with a disclaimer: “‘Design in Times of Crisis’ is a big title. We want to align expectations before we begin.”
In Jordan, where Fantasmeem’s sister project Takween was launched on Jan. 29, designers appear weary of expectations to solve structural issues. “I am a bit sick of the problem-solving approach to design in Jordan,” Amman Design Week Director Rana Beiruti told The Daily Star, citing refugees and the water crisis as examples of problems designers are expected to solve.
“It weighs heavily on the shoulders of designers in Jordan.”
According to Beiruti, the third edition of Amman Design Week is about dreams.
“This year we are absolving designers of the duty to figure out solutions to big problems,” she said.
